From the Editors:Such was the topic considered by members of a new discussion club, "The Free Word" [Svobodnoe slovo] , along with specialists from the Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences.

For over a century, Haeckel's Gastraea theory remained a dominant theory to explain the origin of multicellular animals. According to this theory, the animal ancestor was a blastula‐like colony of uniform cells that gradually evolved cell differentiation. Today, however, genes that typically control metazoan development, cell differentiation, cell‐to‐cell adhesion, and cell‐to‐matrix adhesion are found in various unicellular relatives of the Metazoa, which suggests the origin of the genetic programs of cell differentiation and adhesion in the root of the Opisthokonta. Multicellular (...) stages occurring in the complex life cycles of opisthokont protists (mesomycetozoeans and choanoflagellates) never resemble a blastula. Here, we discuss a more realistic scenario of transition to multicellularity through integration of pre‐existing transient cell types into the body of an early metazoon, which possessed a complex life cycle with a differentiated sedentary filter‐feeding trophic stage and a non‐feeding blastula‐like larva, the synzoospore. Choanoflagellates are considered as forms with secondarily simplified life cycles. (shrink)

This paper examines two models of language philosophy. The first is the Kantian philosophy which sees language as an instrument of conveying mental content. I have selected Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl from amongst its numerous representatives. In this tradition, a language expression, i.e. an expression that has meaning, is determined by the objectively ideal character of the meanings (“rules”) given through the subject’s intellectual acts. The main task is to fix with a maximum degree of accuracy what is “seen” (...) in consciousness. This model inevitably considers words to be “markers” or “labels” which have no intrinsic power. The problem with this approach is, first, that it is impossible to determine the criteria by which this or that word should be considered adequate. Second, this approach leads to the creation of ever new philosophical languages which simultaneously challenge the tradition and yet claim to be a renewed version of it. It is shown that the fairly systematic critique of the Kant­ian approach by Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder falls short of proposing an alternative philosophical system because, having a religious foundation, it does not offer a complete grounding of knowledge. In the wide range of anti-Kantian positions on the nature of language Gustav Shpet’s concept of language is singled out. It pursues the same task of creating a universal system of knowledge as Husserl’s phenomenology, but it proceeds from fundamentally different notions of philosophical knowledge. Unlike Husserl, whose thought is marked by revolutionary radicalism, for Shpet ideal knowledge is “positive”, “concrete”, “full” and “dynamic”. He considers philosophising to be dialectical and inherently dialogic. The result of philosophy meeting these ideals is the concept that our knowledge is centred on language and our experience has a sign-verbal character. (shrink)

As it happened, I became acquainted with E.V. Il'enkov quite late, in the mid- or even the late 1960s. It was only a bit more than ten years before his death that I began to feel at home in his house, was able to visit without calling ahead, and was able to call him by his first name and the familiar "you"—that is, like many, many of not only his true friends but also like-minded thinkers, who became his close acquaintances, (...) most of whom justly considered themselves his pupils … The door would open wide, and Olia, Professor K.I. Salimova, Eval'd's wife and most devoted friend, not at all surprised by the unexpected guest and seemingly even quite happy at his arrival , would try first to draw him into the kitchen and feed him … which she more often than not succeeded in doing. I am not talking about myself: there were always many guests, and this is precisely how they arrived at the Il'enkovs' apartment. Recently, a critic in Literaturnaia gazeta recalled those whom he met in Eval'd's apartment in the 1960s: "This was a tight circle of like-minded thinkers," wrote the critic. "But some of them are no longer with us, while most are far away, beyond our borders." Obviously, he had not been in the house often or had forgotten things over the distance of years. There was no "circle," nor could there have been one—not with this host, not with his lifestyle and way of relating to people. I met a good hundred fine and various people in Eval'd's home: I.N. Korzhavin, V. Davydov, A. Meshcheriakov, S. Vinogradova, N. Dubinin, V. Zinchenko, A. Zinov'ev, Iu. Kamiakin, and … indeed, five pages would not be enough to list the quite famous and the not-quite-so-famous, simply ordinary people with no claim to fame. Nazym Khikmet, A.N. Leont'ev, and B.M. Kedrov were friends of the house … Ever new faces, figures, and words come to mind. I cannot forgive myself: once Eval'd Vasil'evich wanted to take me along to Iurii Liubimov's to read his play Neither God nor Tsar nor Hero … [Ni bog, ni tsar' i ni geroi], but I had some other business, something so important that I do not even remember now what it was, and it is probably not worth remembering. But most likely I was too timid to appear uninvited at the house of a person burning with creativity. The same thing happened with Galich … Eval'd liked especially his song about Zoshchenko. He did not sing it; he narrated it, but in such a way that tears always came to one's eyes. (shrink)

The article covers such issues as the relevance of the theory of perception as a multi-level information processing, the methodological role of the concept of representation and the relation of neurodynamic structures to subjective experience. The author critically reviews the philosophical presumptions underlying the various concepts of “local rationality,” the core of which is constituted by the belief that large ethnic cultures generate or are based on their own rationality and their own logic. Three statements are successively considered: thinking is (...) based on the inherent rules of rationality, logic is an extract of rationality, and types of rationality are geographically consistent with large ethnocultural communities. Empirical arguments are presented that demonstrate equivocality of the first two theses. In particular, firstly, it is shown that the genuine rationality of thinking lies not in following the rules that are immanent to it, but in the development of thinking and, more broadly, cognitive operations towards optimization of certain indicators of the cognitive or motor system that are important for survival and adaptation. In addition, this rationality is multivariate, and the choice between variants is often weakly determined or even random. Thus, the first statement turns out to be refuted. Secondly, by reference to the well-known experiments, it is shown that most people do not explicitly follow some declared logical rules in solving even logical or mathematical problems, and yet there is reason to consider their behavior rational. The third thesis, as shown with some limited empirical material, appears to be partially confirmed. Nevertheless, the demonstration of the doubtfulness of the first two theses makes the conclusion that different nations have different logics insufficiently substantiated. (shrink)

The paper is dedicated to particular cases of interaction and mutual impact of philosophy and cognitive science. Thus, philosophical preconditions in the middle of the 20th century shaped the newly born cognitive science as mainly based on conceptual and propositional representations and syntactical inference. Further developments towards neural networks and statistical representations did not change the prejudice much: many still believe that network models must be complemented with some extra tools that would account for proper human cognitive traits. I address (...) some real implemented connectionist models that show how ‘new associationism ’ of the neural network approach may not only surpass Humean limitations, but, as well, realistically explain abstraction, inference and prediction. Then I stay on Predictive Processing theories in a little more detail to demonstrate that sophisticated statistical tools applied to a biologically realist ontology may not only provide solutions to scientific problems or integrate different cognitive paradigms but propose some philosophical insights either. To conclude, I touch on a certain parallelism of Predictive Processing and philosophical inferentialism as presented by Robert Brandom. (shrink)

In seventeenth-century Germany art and reality stood in a contradictory relationship to one another, and this contradiction was a fruitful one: it contained, in an undeveloped and indistinct form, the paths that art was to take in the centuries that followed. From the point of view of the history of culture, it is important to feel the basic contradiction of this period, the pledge of the developments of the future, even though the period itself perhaps suffered from this contradiction. We (...) ourselves will be helped in this direction—that is, towards the elucidation of the central contradiction of seventeenth-century art—by a few isolated comments and observations on the literary texts of the time. (shrink)

Discussions on the alleged methodological specificity of social knowledge are fueled to not the least extent by a kind of retarded position of the latter against technological advancements of natural and information science based on exact methods and formal or quantitative languages. It is more or less obvious that applicability of exact scientific methods to social disciplines is highly dependent on a chosen conception of social reality, i. e., on social ontology. In the article, the author critically approaches the ontological (...) views of Tony Lawson and proposes a computational view on social ontology that is supposed to eliminate some internal contradictions of Lawson's realist conception. (shrink)

A study of the relationship of trends towards specialization and universalization of scientific knowledge is most fruitful when sociological and epistemological methods are compared. Sociological methods describe the growth of scientific knowledge quantitatively as an increase in volume, whereas epistemological methods do it qualitatively in terms of an increase in the level of generalization. The sociological explanation of the specialization of researchers is based on the limited resources of the study time, the epistemological explanation of the differentiation of disciplines is (...) in the ontological differences of the objects of research. On the contrary, epistemological universalization – the formulation of generalizing theories is conditioned by the social need to ensure the connectivity of the network of technical practices. The history of the development of natural sciences shows a tendency towards absorption of the less developed paradigms by more developed ones. In other words, scientific knowledge increases cumulatively both in quantitative and qualitative terms. (shrink)

Seen through the eyes of filmmaker David Teboul—who completed a documentary about the artist in 2010—Boris Mikhailov: I’ve Been Here Before offers an overview of Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov’s career. One of the most important artists to have emerged from the former Soviet Union, Mikhailov has for more than thirty years taken photographs that engage with the idea of the individual in the public sphere, as well as the breakup of the Soviet Union and its many human (...) casualties. Extensively illustrated with stills from Teboul’s film, the book also includes transcripts of Mikhailov’s discussions with Teboul, in which he provides insight into both his work and, more generally, the life of an artist in the Soviet Union before and after its fall. This volume brings back into focus Mikhailov’s beautifully crafted and often melancholy body of work which was relatively unknown prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse. (shrink)

Helmholtz’ electrically induced extra mass inside a charged hollow sphere, recently evidenced by Mikhailov, is analogous to Mach’s inertial mass. Existence of a corresponding magnetically induced extra mass in an electron flying around an “autistic magnet” is derived. The overall electro-magnetic effect can be covariantly expressed.

Toward the end of his life, the Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky turned away from his earlier work that he has become famous for only to sow the seeds for a new theory. In this theory, affect was to play a central role, there was to be a primacy of social relations, and anything mental (mind, thought, self, other, knowledge) was an event rather than a thing. This is essentially a transactional perspective. In this book, the author articulates a transactional psychology (...) of education drawing on the works of G.H. Mead, J. Dewey, G. Bateson, F. Mikhailov, and E. Il'enkov. All theoretical positions are developed out of videotaped exchanges, thereby giving concrete character to every psychological concept articulated. (shrink)

This is a transcription of a debate on the concept of a person conducted in Moscow in 1983. David Bakhurst argues that Evald Ilyenkov's social constructivist conception of personhood, founded on Marx's thesis that the human essence is the ensemble of social relations, is either false or trivially true. F. T. Mikhailov, V. S. Bibler, V. A. Lektorsky and V. V. Davydov critically assess Bakhurst's arguments, elucidate and contextualize Ilyenkov's views, and defend, in contrasting ways, the claim that human (...) individuals are socially constituted beings. Issues discussed include: the concepts of activity (dejatel'nost') and community (obenija) and their relevance to the notions of mind and personhood; self-consciousness and its relation to personal identity; naturalism in Soviet thought. Translated from the Russian. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the ideas expressed by Igor Mikhailov in his paper “Subjects and Methods of Empirical Theories of Consciousness” and discuss some problems as­sociated with the possibility of non – empirical or non – experimental study of con­sciousness. While generally agreeing with the conclusions of Mikhailov’s paper regard­ing his proposals for improving matters in empirical theories of consciousness, namely, that such theories can benefit from the presence in them of a computational level with real modeling (...) potential, with the fact that theses of such theories will have a probabilis­tic nature, and so on, I dispute some aspects of his interpretations of two contemporary works on criteria of successful empirical theories, in particular his interpretation of the compression criterion, articulated in a recent paper by Konstantin Anokhin, and his interpretation of the Anokhin’s parameter “how”. In the article I also show that one of the key criteria of empirical theories put forward by Igor Mikhailov, namely the cri­terion of falsifiability, requires careful attention and needs to be clarified, that leads to its transformation into the concept of weak direct verifiability, because otherwise it may turn out that all theses are falsifiable. I claim that speculative theories of con­sciousness can be defined as theories that contain directly unverifiable propositions. At the same time, I argue that non – experimental theories of consciousness do not have to be speculative. The creators of armchair theories of the right kind can clarify the ontological status of consciousness by conceptual analysis of the fundamental atti­tudes of human “folk ontology”. (shrink)

Based on exploration of activities of the joint Russian-Ukrainian historical commission, the paper addresses the interpretation of events of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921 by historical schools and some researchers of the Russian Federation, specifically O. Chubarian, T. Tairova-Yakovleva, O. Zaitsev, D. Bondarenko, V. Mikhailov et al., who generally assess the work of Ukrainian historians as unfounded revision of the revolutionary events of 1917-1921 for the purpose of simulating the historical process as a number of tragedies, plots, devastators etc. (...) It is established that by denying the Ukrainian Revolution events as a restoration process of Ukrainian statehood and formation of Ukrainian identity as well as by denying subsequent Bolshevist intervention and assessing those events as an internal civil conflict, Russian historians actually maintain that Ukraine is an integral part of the Russian superpower and has no history of its own. The author defines such interpretation of the 1917-1921 events and refusal to recognize specific features of the Ukrainian Revolution, which are spread in academic community and mass media of the RF, as information and propaganda activities along with perversion of other events of the historical past of Ukraine. (shrink)

Ethical attitudes and behaviour are complex. This complexity extends to the influencers operating at different levels both outside and within the organisation, and in different combinations for different individuals. There is hence a growing need to understand the proximal and distal influencers of ethical attitudes, and how these operate in concert at the individual, organisational, and societal levels. Few studies have attempted to combine these main research streams and systematically examine their combined impact. The minority of studies that have taken (...) a combined approach have often done so using conventional statistical and analytical techniques which imply linearity between variables—a situation that rarely exists in business settings and is likely to lead to simplistic or even erroneous conclusions. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis approach, this paper reports on the mutual and simultaneous influence of individual demographic factors, as well as proximal and distal factors stemming from within and outside the work environment to understand individuals’ ethical views within the workplace. The multiple configurations that emerged reveal the complex nature of influencers of ethical attitudes, and reinforce the view that “one size does not fit all”. We discuss these implications together with managerial recommendations and future research directions. (shrink)

Evald Ilyenkov’s last book, Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism, was published in 1980 shortly after the author’s tragic demise. In it he celebrated the 70th anniversary of Lenin’s still controversial Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909). Like Lenin’s own book, this final contribution by Ilyenkov is often dismissed as mere polemic. But as Lev Naumenko noted in the original preface: “the fires of the ideological struggle have not weakened”. Under the protective shield of “Leniniana”, as Lev Naumov called it, Ilyenkov (...) set out his approach to materialist dialectics as both the science of logic and the logic of revolution. I discuss the nature of Ilyenkov’s motives, the place of Leninist Dialectics within his philosophical oeuvre and why the original manuscript was censored by the Politizdat publishers. I draw on memoirs by Ilyenkov’s close colleague and friend Felix Mikhailov and intended co-author, Grigori Vodolazov. Their testimonies make evident that Ilyenkov’s challenge to the myth of “two Lenins” was a thinly disguised attack on the technocratic anti-humanistic ideology that prevailed in the late 1970s Soviet Union. I propose that Lenin was inspired by Hegel’s dialectic throughout his life through Russian writers as well as Marx and Engels. Ilyenkov explains how Lenin’s EmpirioCriticism embodied dialectical concepts that cannot be described as crude materialism. Finally I suggest that Ilyenkov’s cri de coeur still stands as a call to the future as a foundation demanding further exploration towards a contemporary theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Talking Politics is a philosophical examination of some of the basic concepts of political discourse. Its primary focus is on the ordinary ; on what is said by politicians, in newspapers and by people in pubs, rather than on the works of political theorists. This is a work of , but not on political theory. Talking Politics is: * Invaluable as a source of reference for students, and contains a detailed index * Arranged thematically, around topics such as `Nation'. Each (...) entry has copious cross-references and suggestions for further reading A. W. Sparkes is uniquely qualified to write such a book, combining some thirty years' teaching as a philosopher with wide experience of, and a life-long fascination with, politics. His attitude is that of a critical, but uncynical, observer. (shrink)

The neutrosophic sets were known since 1999, and because of their wide applications and their great flexibility to solve the problems, we used these the concepts to define a new types of neutrosophic crisp closed sets and limit points in neutrosophic crisp topological space, namly [neutrosophic crisp Gem sets and neutrosophic crisp Turig points] respactvely, we stady their properties in details and join it with topological concepts. Finally we used [neutrosophic crisp Gem sets and neutrosophic crisp Turig points] to introduce (...) of topological concepts as: neutrosophic crisp closed (open) sets, neutrosophic crisp closure, neutrosophic crisp interior, neutrosophic crisp extrior and neutrosophic crisp boundary which are fundamental for further reserch on neutrosophic crisp topology and will setrengthen the foundations of theory of neutrosophic topological spaces. (shrink)

The level of medical care to patients and the success of the implementation of the national project "Health" depend on the health status and doctor's professionalism. Modern healthcare reform is being implemented by optimizing costs, merging medical organizations, closing ineffective hospitals, expanding the use of high-tech care and informatization of the doctor's activities. All this makes it necessary to assess the health of doctors. Scientists have studied the quality of life and identified the professional burnout of doctors in children's clinics (...) in different age groups. Primary care pediatricians have a higher quality of life score when compared to the standard [1]. However, all groups have a high level of professional burnout. The pre-retirement group of doctors has more unfavorable profile. They are highly professional specialists but may experience emotional discomfort because the pension system has been reformed. This situation requires the introduction of preventive work with doctors of this age as a group with great potential and capable of professional longevity. (shrink)

This note gives a new proof of the 'operational extensionality' property of Abramsky's lazy lambda calculus-namely the coincidence of contextual equivalence with a co-inductively defined notion of 'applicative bisimilarity'. This purely syntactic results is here proved using a logical relation between the syntax and its denotational semantics. The proof exploits a mixed inductive/coinductive characterisation of the logical relation recently discovered by the author.

Originally published in 1923, this title is a critical examination of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. A contemporary of Freud, the author sets out to evaluate his theories in a scientific manner, searching for evidence. The result is a rather scathing review of where this is lacking.

Heart of Wisdom: A Commentary to the Heart Sutra. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. Tharpa Publications, London 1986. xix, 210 pp. £6.95.

Open peer commentary on the article “Developing a Dialogical Platform for Disseminating Research through Design” by Abigail C. Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace & Joyce Yee. Upshot: The experimental conference format described by Durrant et al. is intended to create an open platform for dissemination and knowledge creation. The field of open design, in which designers create structures to support creative action by others, offers relevant insights and alternative approaches. For example: while it is logical to see openness as open (...) choice, it can be productive to instead think of openness as constructed through a balance of structure and choice. (shrink)

Michael Choniates (c. 1138–c. 1222), a pupil of Eustathius of Thessalonica, who was Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Athens for some 25 years up to that city's capture by Frankish crusaders ina.d.1205, is best known to classical scholars as the possessor of probably the last complete copy of Callimachus'HecaleandAetia. He had brought with him from Constantinople many books of all kinds, and added to his collection when in Athens. Although an immense task, it would be well worth trying to identify all (...) Michael's classical allusions, as an indication of how much ancient Greek literature was still available just before Constantinople too succumbed to the crusaders. (shrink)